In the News: Nobel Snub, Bad Egg

The Nobel Prize in Literature will probably not go to an American writer this year, given recent remarks by the leading member of the Swedish Academy: “The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining.”

The Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu has written a poem against terrorism, in response to Saturday’s bomb blast in New Delhi.

A bookbindery whose clients have included Henry Kissinger and Mikhail Gorbachev has been forced by a rent increase to move from the Upper East Side of Manhattan to Gravesend, Brooklyn.

In Rio de Janeiro, at a ceremony commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the death of the writer Machado de Assis, the President of Brazil signed into law spelling reforms that will affect 0.5 per cent of all the words used in Brazilian Portuguese.

Humpty Dumpty, of nursery-rhyme fame, was not an egg, but a cannon, broken during the English Civil War.

An Israeli bookseller has been barred from importing literature to Israel from Syria and Lebanon.

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